Gabriel Fauré - Horizons

The Guardian 80

Fouchenneret/Zaoui/Merlin/Lefort
A muscularity and lack of preciousness in these performances bring out the subtleties in Fauré’s late works

This collection of Gabriel Fauré’s chamber music is by no means comprehensive; for a complete survey, the 2011 Virgin Classics recordings, with the Capuçon brothers and pianists Nicholas Angelich and Michel Dalberto, remain the ones to seek out. In this new set (on label Aparté), from violinist Pierre Fouchenneret, cellist Raphaël Merlin and pianist Simon Zaoui, the focus is very much on the later works. The main pieces are the two sonatas for cello and piano, the Second Violin Sonata, and the Piano Trio, all of which were composed in the eight years before Fauré’s death in 1924. Presumably for completeness, the First Violin Sonata, from 1876, is also included, underlining the stylistic distance that his music travelled over the course of his composing career, together with several miniatures and three of the piano nocturnes, also late pieces. There’s also the last of the song cycles, L’Horizon Chimérique, which dates from 1921, sung by the tenor David Lefort.

Like the Capuçons, these young French musicians clearly have these works deeply ingrained in their musical thinking, and that familiarity shows in the total lack of preciousness in their performances, whether it’s in the forthright way that Merlin and Zaoui launch into the Second Cello Sonata Op 117, or the edgy unease with which the Piano Trio opens. There’s never a lack of muscularity, but it’s always kept on the right side of over-assertiveness. The warm closeness of the sound, meanwhile, brings out the subtleties in the way in which the instrumentalists colour every phrase, just as it adds a nice sheen to Lefort’s reedy timbre in his fastidious account of the song cycle.